There are times when, as a viewer, you become intensely aware of the richness of contexts, references, influences and meanings circulating around, through and out of an artist’s work. As you look at the work, countless connections and revelations come to you, silent explosions of perception and thought that the artwork sets off, as all the while the object itself remains at the center of this proliferation, unperturbed and undisturbed.

Something of the kind happened for me at the recent show of sculptures by Melvin Edwards at Alexander Gray Associates in New York. Now in his 70s, Edwards has been making and exhibiting work since the 1960s. (On January 31, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas will open a retrospective of his work.) He is best known for his Lynch Fragments, a series of welded-steel wall reliefs that began in 1963, near the very start of Edwards’s career, when he was living in Los Angeles, and which the artist has continued to return to since. A distinguishing feature of the Lynch Fragments, inaugurated against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, is the inclusion of functional objects, or parts of them, such as hand tools, machine parts and construction elements. The source of their considerable power lies, I think, in the tension Edwards achieves between compositional complexity and visceral imagery, between sheer form and fragments of the lived-in world. He is at once a great assemblagist and a great abstractionist.

The recent Alexander Gray show focused on Edwards’s long involvement with Africa. including a number of sculptures made in Dakar, Senegal, where Edwards maintained a studio from 2000 to 2013. Edwards first visited Africa in 1970 with his wife Jayne Cortez, a poet who died in 2012. During his frequent trips Edwards met many African artists, in Nigeria, Ghana and Zimbabwe, among other countries, and for the 13 years that he had a studio in Dakar, traveled twice a year to Senegal. As he remarks in the show’s catalogue, “I don’t see my life in the United States and in Africa as separate.” (While I’m on the subject of Africa, I wonder if anyone has explored, in writing or through an exhibition, how visiting Africa has affected artists in the U.S. Along with Edwards, I quickly think of two other New York-based artists who have been deeply marked by their time in Africa: Howardena Pindell and Alain Kirili. I’m sure there are others.)

Many of the sculptures in the show, which were drawn from three different series (Lynch Fragments, Discs and Grids) have African-related titles. Some of them were made in Africa, such as Tengenege (1988) constructed in Zimbabwe. Others are composed entirely from elements sourced in Africa, such as Ginau Tabaski (2006) created in Senegal. Edwards incorporates many kinds of objects into his wall reliefs. In this show I noted chisels, gears, pieces of rebar, padlocks, horseshoes, the blade of a hoe, a set of rake prongs, a hammerhead, various types of knives, bolts and steel pipe and, welded onto many of the works, lengths of chain. Even more than the variety and specificity of these artfully joined objects, it is a remarkable density and compactness, a knotlike compression that defines Edwards’s reliefs.

Chains reappear in other of Edwards’s works such as the “chain curtains” in which lengths of chain are hung from strands of barbed wire suspended from the ceiling. Most viewers will immediately interpret all these chains as signifiers of slavery and racism, a reading that would be fully justified and within the intentions of the artist, but the presence of chains also speaks to a less evident influence—Antoni Gaudí. In a lengthy interview with Michael Brenson recently published as part of Bomb Magazine’s Oral History Project devoted to “documenting the life stories of New York City’s African American artists,” Edwards explains how he was inspired by Gaudí’s practice of planning his revolutionary designs with catenary chain models made with strings and weights. After buying a book on Gaudí in the early 1960s, Edwards began introducing catenary structures into his own work. Underlining his debt to Gaudí, Edwards tells Brenson that he has “paid much more attention to him than Caro.”

Another unexpected influence that Edwards discusses in the Bomb interview is George Sugarman, an artist known for his remarkably free use of color and form in sculpture. I suspect that few people looking at Edwards’s unpainted steel forms would think of Sugarman, but Edwards credits Sugarman, whom he met in 1965, as the artist who clarified for him “the idea that more of the environment was covered by a piece.” He also appreciated Sugarman’s use of color. A connection to Sugarman is more evident in the painted-steel public sculptures that Edwards has made intermittently throughout his career.

The Alexander Gray show included one environmental sculpture, a work that has a fascinating backstory and is linked to an important figure in 20th century poetry Titled Homage to the Poet Léon-Gontran Damas (1978-81), the sculpture consists of several large planar steel elements either freestanding, leaning against each other or against a wall, a pair of circular steel benches and a long steel chain carefully laid out in a circle on the floor.

Born in French Guiana, the French territory on the northeast coast of South America, Léon-Gontran Damas (1912-1978) was a student in Paris in the late 1930s when, together with Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001), he helped launch Négritude, an epochal cultural movement that argued forcefully for black pride and an embrace of traditional African culture.

Léon-Gontran Damas

Influenced by the Harlem Renaissance, Négritude not only transformed a generation of Francophone black writers and became a powerful force in world literature, but also had far-reaching political affects. Senghor, for instance, would become, in 1960, the first president of Senegal. The book that launched Négritude was Pigments, a slim collection of Damas’s poems that was published by Guy Lévis Mano in the spring of 1937 with a frontispiece by Frans Masereel and an introduction by Surrealist poet Robert Desnos.

Frans Masereel, frontispiece to Pigments, 1937, woodcut.

(Lévis Mano [1904-1980] was a poet, translator, typographer and publisher whose press, Editions GLM, was an important conduit for the Surrealist poets. The elegantly designed but modestly sized publications of GLM frequently included artwork by artists such as Balthus, Hans Bellmer and Marcel Duchamp. Lévis Mano also published translations of writers from around the globe.) With its frank expressions of Damas’s rage at the crimes of European colonialism and his sense of alienation as a black man in Paris, Pigments introduced a powerful new voice into modern poetry. Too powerful for some: when poems from Pigments (translated into Baoulé) were recited by African draft resisters in the Ivory Coast in 1939, the book was banned throughout French West Africa.

Original edition of Léon-Gontran Damas, Pigments, GLM, Paris, 1937.

In a text printed in the catalogue of the Alexander Gray show Edwards recounts the genesis of Homage to the Poet Léon-Gontran Damas :“I had known him [Damas] for several years, and one day, he mentioned that his house in Cayenne [the capital of French Guiana] had burned down. It was the old family house built in the traditional style, and he was going to have it rebuilt. But soon after he got ill and passed away. He had said to me he wanted me to create a piece of sculpture, for his house, something significant. So I took that into consideration, because we were very close to him. My [late] wife Jayne [Cortez] read at his funeral, his wife asked me to accompany his casket to the crematorium. We had become like family. So when I thought about his passing, I felt a need to create a work. I did the basic structure for this piece in two months: the pointed circle, the seating area, the silhouette image of what it would be as if it were a folded page supported by a circle, and a fifty-foot length of chain on the floor. The installation is a celebration of the rise of the sun, the fall of the sun, or sunset, or the transitions of life. In a sense, the transition of culture, which is what Damas’ work is about.”

The history of modern art is rich with dialogues between artists and poets, from Baudelaire/Courbet to Rilke/Rodin, Jacob/Picasso, Clark Coolidge/Philip Guston or, more recently, Charles Bernstein/Amy Sillman. The encounter of Melvin Edwards and Léon-Gontran Damas is a worthy addition to this ongoing tradition.

Many are the darts thrown at abstract painting just now. Dismissive epithets pile up in front of canvases. Good paintings, bad paintings and indifferent paintings are equally held to blame for the sins of the market. Abstraction is seen by many as a corrupt practice.

All of this happens, and perhaps can only happen, within a historical void; it happens, in part, because we still lack an adequate history of recent painting. Over the last decade there have been a very few exhibitions that have attempted to explore this history from a New York perspective (“High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975” in 2007, “Conceptual Abstraction” in 2012, my own “Reinventing Abstraction” in 2013), and if there have been any books on the subject, I haven’t yet seen them.

Here, then, are notes towards another chapter of my once and future history of painting in New York. Here, then, some observations about one of the period’s best painters, whose work, at least for the moment, is hovering silently in barely visible empyrean zones like one of the floating mandalas in his final paintings. Here, then, in brief, is Stephen Mueller (1947-2011).

Mueller began showing his work in New York in the mid-1970s, following studies at the University of Texas in Austin and at Bennington College. At the time Bennington was a bastion of Color Field painting and Greenbergian formalism, and although Mueller rejected many of its tenets, he was also deeply marked by the work of artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland whose influence, he remarked to an interviewer much later, was “shoved down your throat” at the Vermont college. In New York, Mueller found his way, for a time, into Color Field’s polar opposite: Warhol’s Factory, where he worked as an assistant, most notably helping to stretch and install Warhol’s most abstract works, the Shadows. (After Warhol’s death in 1987, Mueller paid tribute to him with a painting titled A. W. Takes a Bow.)

It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that Mueller emerged with a distinctive style in which thinned-out acrylic paint is used to create soft, glowing, loosely geometric stained grounds (reminiscent of Rothko’s “multiform” paintings) that Mueller then defaces with pigment-thick gestural forms that have a Baroque grotesquerie about them. Additionally, there are often sprays of ink that seem to have been misted onto the canvas. (I don’t use the word “misted” by chance—Mueller was an aficionado of perfumes.) In some cases flurries of glitter are sprinkled onto the canvas. More ubiquitous are small rectangular blocks of solid color, often containing modestly sized but altogether exquisite gestural marks, that seem both to sit on the picture plane and cut an aperture into it. These insets or shapes, depending on how you choose to read them, no doubt owe something to Hans Hoffmann, but I suspect that a more direct source are the similar shapes that began showing up in David Salle’s paintings just two or three years earlier. If Hoffmann is about push/pull spatial dynamics, Salle is about discursive interruption and stylistic contamination. For all his lifelong commitment to abstraction, Mueller took a great deal from Neo-Expressionism. Many of the pictorial devices as well as a sense of glamorous drama in his 1980s paintings recall elements from Polke, Schnabel, Salle, while some of the brushwork looks borrowed from lugubrious paintings by the likes of Rainer Fetting and Enzo Cucchi. And yet, Mueller, even in the 1980s, never looks like a “school-of” artist, in part because isn’t tempted by figuration (a requirement of Neo-Expressionism), in part because of his sheer painterly ability and daring. This isn’t to say that his work was unconnected from representational art. According to Holland Cotter, who wrote a marvelous catalogue essay for Mueller’s 1987 show at Fabian Carlsson in London, his paintings were sometimes inspired by 19th century marine-scapes, and by the landscape of Hydra, the Greek island he often visited. Mueller’s painting Meltami (sic) alludes to the powerful meltemi or etesian winds that tear through the Aegean Sea in summertime.

In the early 1990s the work changed dramatically. The gritty gestures disappeared, and with them the sense of an artist hell bent on destroying the decorum of Color Field painting. Mueller’s surfaces grew calm, the space grew deeper, and the newly uncluttered paintings became suffused with color and light. Held aloft by some invisible force were luminous orbs and hypnotic rings of color, as well as concentrated areas of decorative patterning (plaids, stripes, trellis-like grids), all of which are painted with devotional delicacy.

Mueller began looking more and more at non-Western art, most notably the tantric painting that would engage him, and increasingly so, for the rest of his life. In the mid-2000s his compositions often featured simple centered forms, usually filled with patterns and silhouetted against gradated grounds. In other paintings Nolandesque circles are ringed with far more fanciful concentric forms, inviting with equal ease viewers in search of a meditative experience and those hungry for intense visual pleasure. His last works, made as he was fighting the lung cancer that would soon fell him, were as complex and as transcendent as anything he had ever made.

The estate of Stephen Mueller is represented by Lennon, Weinberg, New York and Texas Gallery, Houston. On February 19, 2015, an exhibition of Mueller’s work will open at Lennon, Weinberg.

How is it that someone who dreamed of “an art of balance, of purity, of serenity, devoid of troubling and depressing subject matter” became a source of relentless innovation and provided a map for the deconstruction (with Supports/Surfaces, Pattern & Decoration and artists as diverse as Simon Hantaï, Al Loving and Jessica Stockholder) of the very medium through which he hoped to achieve serenity? French scholar Rémi Labrusse has described Matisse’s “radical decoration” as the result of his staged confrontation between Western mimesis and Eastern decoration. Clement Greenberg, who dreamed of an avant-garde pastoral, attributed Matisse’s impact to “the paint, the disinterested paint.”

Over the last year or so a lot of the painting I’ve been most struck by has pursued some kind of “radical decoration,” engaged with “disinterested paint” or both. In some cases (Lori Ellison, Franklin Evans), Matisse has clearly been on the artist’s mind, in others there is no explicit referencing but plenty of affinities. Then, there is the case of Michael Krebber, whose desultory marks could be read as a cruel parody of Matissean nonchalance. As I suggested some years ago in my articles on provisionality in painting, the casual touch of much contemporary art recuperates the economy of gesture pioneered by Matisse, but there are other paths that connect his work to the present, exemplified here by Evans’s multi-medium installation at Ameringer McEnery Yohe earlier this year in which the legacy of Matisse (and a lot else) was filtered through an array of idiosyncratic information systems.

]]>http://thesilo.raphaelrubinstein.com/artists/matisse-etc-part-2/feed0Matisse Etc. (part 1)http://thesilo.raphaelrubinstein.com/artists/matisse-etc-part-1
http://thesilo.raphaelrubinstein.com/artists/matisse-etc-part-1#commentsTue, 28 Oct 2014 01:34:54 +0000http://thesilo.raphaelrubinstein.com/?p=1103Continue reading →]]>Influence is only interesting when it results in something unexpected, when it jumps languages, generations, mediums, styles, when it is not immediately recognizable as such. I’m thinking about influence because I’m thinking about Matisse, whose influence pervades the last 100 years of art perhaps more widely and deeply than any other single artist. Why did Matisse have such a massive, and prolonged, impact? It’s not just a matter of his artistic greatness (proved yet once again by the current show of the cutouts at the Museum of Modern Art in New York). There seems to be something in Matisse’s work that, under the best conditions, gives considerable space to other artists to construct something new.

Art historians have traced countless instances of Matisse’s influence, but there is one episode that hasn’t, I think, been sufficiently explored. It begins at Les Trois Marroniers, a small café-tabac on the rue du Dragon in Saint-Germain-des-Prés that in early 1950s was frequented by a band of expatriate American painters, including Sam Francis, Shirley Jaffe, Norman Bluhm, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Kimber Smith.

Rue du Dragon, Paris.

What drew these artists to Les Trois Marroniers wasn’t the café itself—it was, by all accounts, a negligible locale—but one of its patrons: Georges Duthuit. A maverick art historian whose focus was Byzantine art and who believed that the Italian Renaissance, with its emphasis on fictive perspectival space, had sent European art in the wrong direction. Duthuit also developed a deep engagement with the art and literature of his time. Chiefly remembered now as the interlocutor in Samuel Beckett’s “Three Dialogues,” Duthuit was the editor of Transition, an important journal of the arts, from 1948 to 1950, and became an influential art critic in the 1950s and 1960s, writing mostly about the abstract painting, in particular the work of Francis and Riopelle.

Georges Duthuit in his studio at 96 Rue de l’Université in 1962. Behind him paintings by Jean-Paul Riopelle, Nicholas de Staël and Henri Matisse.

In addition to his stimulating ideas and charismatic presence (Francis recalled him as “a Baudelairean dandy”), Duthuit offered the American painters something else important—a direct connection to Matisse. In 1923, Duthuit had married Matisse’s daughter Marguerite, and although the discovery of Duthuit’s affair with another woman had strained relations between the painter and his son-in-law, Duthuit remained an enthusiastic and eloquent supporter of Matisse’s work. Looking back at the rue du Dragon gatherings, Jaffe has recalled how Duthuit “spoke to us so much about” Matisse. All these painters were marked by their years in Paris in ways that set them apart from their U.S.-bound contemporaries, but the importance of their encounter with the work of Matisse, and with Duthuit’s interpretation of it, can’t be underestimated. (Of course, Matisse was also important to expatriate artists beyond the clientele of the Trois Marronniers, including Joan Mitchell, who was close to all of the Trois Marronniers regulars and also knew Duthuit, as well as others such as Ellsworth Kelly, George Sugarman and Ed Clark.)

The influence of Matisse on Sam Francis has long been recognized and one has only to compare Matisse’s Blue Nude cutouts (1952) and Francis’s Blue Form works from circa 1960 to perceive the strong connection, although Matisse’s insistence on the necessity of the figure, the ”object,” doesn’t carry over to Francis’s proto-process abstractions.

With Kimber Smith, who would have been a welcome addition to the Musée Matisse show, Matisse’s impact is visible in the American’s economical brushwork, his (apparent) nonchalance and bold deployment of color and patterning via abbreviated, signlike motifs. Smith’s response to Matisse’s work takes on greater depth in his last works where he engaged aspects of the cancer that would kill him with a visual style that we read as carefree and joyful. When we look at Smith, just as when we look at Matisse, we must remember that a buoyant style doesn’t preclude the experience of despair.

Chez Shirley Jaffe one must be careful not to equate visual resemblance with direct influence. Jaffe’s colorful “white ground” paintings have often been compared to Matisse’s cutouts, but Jaffe has made it clear that she came to her way of working by other paths.

In a 1989 interview with Yves Michaud, Jaffe says: “I don’t think that [her vocabulary of forms] came from looking at Matisse. I wonder, rather, if it didn’t come from my love of Persian and Indian and French miniatures, for Fouquet, or even more for mosaics, for Sassetta and the Italians.”[1] In fact, Jaffe’s process, with its patient accumulation of minute brushstrokes and continual adjustments, couldn’t be further from Matisse’s. What Jaffe took away from her encounter with Duthuit may have had as much to do with his conception of Byzantine art as with his comments about Matisse. Byzantine mosaics were near the center of Duthuit’s art historical vision, while for Jaffe, when she was living in Berlin in 1963-64 at a crucial point in her career, the Ravenna mosaics at the Bode Museum were very important.

Although, thanks to Duthuit, he was close to the Matisse family during his years in Paris (1948-1956), Norman Bluhm didn’t fully engage Matisse’s art until several decades later. It’s true that the gestural shapes which first appear in his work in the late 1950s owe much to the liberated figures that float through Matisse’s work from the two La Danse paintings (1909-1910) to the cutouts, but to my eye the final decade of Bluhm’s work (1989-1999), which is marked by increasingly ornate and large-scale decorative schemes, is where he makes the most of Matisse’s legacy.

My feeling is that artists are still looking at Matisse very intently and very productively. In a subsequent Silo entry I plan to look at more recent instances of his impact. I also hope to say more about Georges Duthuit.

The painter James Bishop is the unnamed subject of “Interlude III” in my article “Provisional Painting 2: To Rest Lightly on the Earth” (Art in America, February, 2012). At the time I felt there was little chance of his work appearing anytime soon at a New York gallery. Now, some two and a half years later, a selection of his paintings is on view at David Zwirner Gallery. I’m taking this occasion to extract my “Interlude” and also to publish, for the first time, a paragraph on Bishop that did not make it into the Art in America article. (I also mention Raoul de Keyser, who died later that year.)

First, the deleted paragraph:

When I think of veteran painters like Raoul de Keyser ensconced in the small Belgian town of Deinze, or the reclusive expatriate James Bishop who has spent much of the last half century hiding out in the French countryside, the first lines of John Ashbery’s poem “Soonest Mended” pop into my mind: “Barely tolerated, living on the margin/ In our technological society.” De Keyser and Bishop seem to have chosen a kind of internal exile as painters, or maybe a better metaphor is that of the mole, in the espionage sense of the word: for decades quietly undermining the system they belong to with hardly anyone noticing. Among major artists, Bishop may be the most elusive: his work either unseen or, if encountered at one of his excessively rare exhibitions, as reticent as a whisper. Thin color has flooded the canvas or paper and receded, leaving visible a residue of barely emerged drawing that suggests an archeological dig seen through patchy fog. Rather than minimalist, the works are subliminalist. Here’s Ashbery again, this time actually writing about Bishop’s paintings: “The pictures suggested portals or prosceniums, but there was no tension, no feeling that something was about to happen on a bare stage, but rather a feeling that something had happened and might one day happen again: that possibilities are better than probabilities.”

And here is the “interlude”:

The scene is Paris in the early 1960s. An art critic remarks to a young expatriate American painter enjoying his gallery debut of thinly painted abstractions, “I see you’re not very interested in matière.” He replies, with a deceptive nonchalance, “Well, I’m interested enough that I try to eliminate it.” Within a few years the materiality of oil paint takes on a more central role in his work when he begins to make paintings by depositing small amounts of liquid paint onto his canvases and tilting them this way and that to direct the paint toward the edges of some feint pencil markings. He never knows exactly what will happen, how a painting will look when it is finished; it often seems to be “doing” itself. Thin color has flooded the canvas or, as he increasingly turns to smaller formats, sheet of paper and receded, leaving visible a residue of barely emerged imagery: hutlike structures, wobbly Roman numerals, luminous grids that suggest an archeological dig seen through patchy fog. Rather than minimalist, they are subliminalist. For a 1987 show of small grey paintings he has a passage from the French writer Maurice Blanchot typed up and affixed to a wall of the gallery. “Speech,” the quotation ends, “is the replacement of a presence by an absence and the pursuit, through presences ever more fragile, of an absence ever more all-sufficing.”

Cover of Peinture: Cahiers Theoriques 8/9, 1974, with work by James Bishop

We’re in Paris in the early 1970s, among 20-somethings who, in the long hangover of May ‘68, frequent the cafes and bars of the Left Bank planning films that rarely get made, talking about books that don’t get written. Most of their talent is expended on clever puns and late-night monologues. It’s in this milieu that a young man conceives of a grisly art project. If he can find a surgeon willing to perform the operation, he is going to have his right hand amputated and placed on display. He plans to set aside a room in his apartment that will contain only one object: his severed hand preserved in formaldehyde with a plaque reading “My Hand, 1940-1972.” His hope is that people will come to view this exhibit, but until now he hasn’t been able to find a cooperative doctor.

Outside of Italy, the work of Guglielmo Achille Cavellini (1914-1990) has long been a well-kept secret—it’s missing from major museum surveys of Italian postwar art, never featured in big auctions or flashy collections and rarely if ever referred to by critics and art historians of the period. Cavellini’s low profile is especially poignant because he was an artist who made self-promotion not simply a priority but often the central content of his work. Long before Jeff Koons and Damian Hirst elided the distinctions between the making and the marketing of art, Cavellini was branding himself with unapologetic boldness. Yet his attention-seeking ploys simultaneously satirize the artworld and his own place in it with an ambiguity that anticipates Martin Kippenberger; he also shared Kippenberger’s notion of the “full-service” artist, who takes responsibility for all ancillary matter such as posters, catalogues and announcement cards. Cavellini’s relentless flouting of artworld decorum also suggests affinities with his compatriot Maurizio Cattelan. One of my favorite Cavellini provocations occurred in 1976, when he got hold of a letter inviting another artist to participate in the Venice Biennale. Substituting his own name for the official invitee, he returned the letter to the Biennale director saying that he, Cavellini, categorically refused to participate in the exhibition.

Cavellini was, in many respects, ahead of his time, especially in his concept of autostoricizzazione or “self-historicism.” Perhaps the purest example of self-historicism in Cavellini’s expansive oeuvre are the “Centenary Posters.” In 1971, he made a series of collages and paintings, each purporting to be a poster advertising an exhibition titled “Cavellini 1914-2014” at a well-known art museum. Employing different type fonts and design styles, Cavellini created plausible looking posters for centennial shows of his art at the Tate, the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney and other prominent museums around the world. Did Cavellini actually believe that he had a chance of being recognized by any of these museums? It’s hard to say. His voluminous writings are filled with self-praise and grandiose claims, but often taken to such ridiculous extremes that he seems to be laughing at himself. With the “Centenary Posters,” Cavellini may appear delusional, but at the same time he is simply reifying what every artist dreams about and hopes for, and by so nakedly displaying his career ambitions he draws our attention to the enormous gap between reality and fantasy, and between the individual artist and the (even then) global art system. As we approach the year when these exhibitions were supposed to happen, the dated style of the early ‘70s graphics renders these fictional shows all the more absurd, but in a period when so much contemporary art depends on sly art-historical references, Cavellini’s project seems thoroughly contemporary.

One of the few American supporters of Cavellini’s work in recent years has been New York art dealer Florence Lynch, who mounted a Cavellini show in Chelsea in 2008. For those who missed that exhibition, there is a concise, fascinating show on view now at LYNCH THAM, a gallery newly launched by Lynch and Bee Tham on New York’s Lower East Side. The show focuses on two series, “Crates with Destroyed Works” (1966-1970) and “From the Page of the Encyclopedia,” a text-based series Cavellini began in 1973. Thanks to their widely spaced slats, the Crates, which are generally displayed on the wall, offer excellent views of the “destroyed” works within: painted-wood, abstract reliefs that Cavellini was making in the early 1960s; each crate is carefully numbered and titled with black letters on the front slats. Destruction is not an unusual theme in art, and in the mid-1960s it was ubiquitous (think of Raphael Montañez Ortiz and the Destruction in Art Symposium), but Cavellini’s methodical approach has none of the violence and aggression that usually accompanies destructive art. Looking like jigsaw puzzles waiting to be assembled or archeological artifacts prepared for shipment, the Crates convey playfulness and preservation rather than iconoclasm. This is even the case when Cavellini turns his destructive impulse to the work of other artists—the “Dissected Works” of 1970 include carefully sliced-up and framed paintings by Klee and Morandi.

How, you might wonder, did Cavellini manage to acquire authentic works by Klee and Morandi? He was, in fact, a major and prescient collector, especially of postwar art. Collecting was at once the source of Cavellini’s artistic inspiration and what kept him from being taken seriously as an artist. His collecting began in 1947, when he discovered informel painting on a trip to Paris. “This was the moment,”” he later wrote, “in which I began to purchase those works of art that I myself would have liked to have made.” [All the quotes in this paragraph are from Cavellini’s statement in Contemporary Artists, an invaluable 1977 reference book edited by Colin Naylor and Genesis P-Orridge.] Giving up his own art practice, he transformed his Brescia home into a gallery and private museum. It was only some 15 years later that he began to make art again, though with some complications. “When I returned actively to painting in 1962, I was already saddled with the unfortunate label ‘the famous collector,’ and even though I have attempted in every way possible to eliminate this preconception it has been to little avail.” Eventually, he conceived of “self-historicism” as the only way out of this dilemma: “It was an absolute necessity that I manage to destroy the preconceived idea of ‘Cavellini the collector who paints,’ and thus I made the only decision possible – to do everything on my own.” Cavellini did ultimately find a sympathetic audience among the practitioners of Mail Art, a medium he enthusiastically embraced, engaging in voluminous correspondences with Ray Johnson and other U.S. mail artists. In parallel with his mail art activities, throughout the 1970s and 1980s he produced many works based on Italian postage stamps.

A key component of self-historicism was Cavellini’s ongoing narration of his own life and career. This began in 1973, when he wrote a long account of his life in the style of an encyclopedia. The entry starts off as a straightforward, strictly factual account, but Cavellini gradually introduces exaggerated claims that get wilder and wilder until he is being received by Mao Tse Tung, awarded the Nobel Prize, and making stupendous scientific discoveries well into the 21st Century. For the rest of his life, he inscribed extracts from and variations on this text onto all manner of supports, including underwear, neckties, skirts, shirts, the bodies of naked models and, most famously, a white suit that the artist often wore during his travels and public appearances. As he explained in his Contemporary Artists entry, “I wore a suit on which I had carefully and minutely written my life history, and I meant it to be an exasperated symbol of the megalomania and presumption that are awash in the art world.” The Lynch Tham show includes several elegant iterations of the Encyclopedia text. One on paper involves quasi-micrographic writing, another features red felt-tip pen on a bronze-colored sheet of metal, in a third the closely spaced lines of cursive letters are copied out onto a large canvas, with the artist’s name stenciled in colored letters along the top. Even if one reads Italian, Cavellini’s handwriting isn’t easy to decipher. Here and there you recognize a word or phrase before the looping script blends into dense pattern, becoming more textile than text. Despite his obsessive autobiography and relentless self-referencing, did Cavellini ultimately want his viewers to look beyond his individual identity? Was his art really as prophetic as it seems? Does he deserve a prominent place in the canon of postwar Italian art? Perhaps only a full retrospective will be able to resolve such questions. The year 2014 is almost upon us, but perhaps there’s still time for some enterprising museum to respond to Cavellini’s audacious challenge. I, for one, would be very happy to visit a show titled “Cavellini 1914-2014.”

Robert Colescott, I Gets A Thrill Too When I Sees Dekoo, 1978, acrylic on canvas, 84 by 60 inches. Collection Rose Art Museum.

Like many others, I have often repeated the orthodoxy that the early 1980s saw a return to painting, a rediscovery of figuration, an embrace of dramatic content and an explicit engagement with art history. And, like everyone else who propagates this convenient formula, I have been deeply, unforgivably wrong. While it’s true that with the advent of Neo-Expressionism there was a much greater interest (at least for a little while) in figurative, art-history drenched, emotionally charged paintings, and more of such work being made, this simplistic. decadist version of events risks blinding us to the fact that several painters were working in this mode during the 1970s—wait, let me revise that last phrase—it risks making us forget (or never recognize in the first place) that several major painters of the period were already working in this mode during the 1970s. They included Malcolm Morley, Paul Georges, Peter Saul and, last but not least, Robert Colescott.

Robert Colescott, Down in the Dumps (So Long Sweet Heart, 1983, 84 by 72 inches, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy Kravets/Wehby, New York.

Colescott, whom I regret never having met, strikes me as a painter of incredible courage. He seems to leap into every painting as if it will be his last, determined to leave no inch of the canvas unactivated, no social taboo unchallenged, no occasion for painterly bravura unseized. His compositions pulse and throb with tightly packed figures and areas of impacted opulent color as if the canvas, no matter how large, isn’t big enough to contain his pictorial energy, or his urgent need to tackle head-on huge subjects. Colescott’s wager was doubly or maybe even triply daring: Was it possible to make great paintings from the crassest racial stereotypes in the American psyche? Was it possible to be a broad social satirist and a color-mad celebrant of painterly excess at the same time? Was it possible to reconcile the high-art legacy of Europe and the flashy, fleshy, rambunctious, loud energy of American vernacular culture?

Robert Colescott, Saturday Night Special (I seen it on TV), 1988, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia.

Against all odds, Colescott won his artistic bets in canvas after canvas. Especially during the last 20 years of his life, he expertly deployed every possible device of painting with a Tarantino-like glee. Some viewers recoil from Colescott’s intensity, feeling equally uncomfortable with his racially (and sexually) charged scenarios and with his baroque, over-the-top style. Others relish this discomfort and are only too happy to let Colescott’s delirious pictorial power wash over them. The path by which Colescott arrived at his singular style was unusual. After the Second World War, he traveled from Berkeley to Paris to study with Fernand Léger, who encouraged him to forsake abstraction. In the mid 1960s he again left the States (he hadn’t stayed in Paris very long) for a fellowship at the American Research Center in Cairo. As he explained in 1985, “I spent a couple of years in Egypt and was influenced by the narrative form of Egyptian art, by 3,000 years of a ‘non-white’ art tradition, and by living in a culture that is strictly ‘non-white.’ I think that excited me about some of the ideas about race and culture in our own culture; I wanted to say something about it.” (I take this from Michael Lobel’s October 2004 Artforum article on Colescott; its original source is “Conversation with Robert Colescott” by Ann Shengold, in Robert Colescott: Another Judgment, Knight Gallery/Spirit Square Arts Center, Charlotte, North Carolina, 1985.) Interstingly, Colescott isn’t the only African-American painter to be deeply affected by visiting Egypt; abstract painter Stanley Whitney also credits a trip to Egypt as crucial for the development of his work. Speaking of geography, it’s surely significant that as Colescott’s career got underway he lived and worked not in New York or Los Angeles but in San Francisco, Portland and Tucson.

As I write these lines it has been almost four years since Colescott died (in June, 2009), at the age of 83; 16 years since he represented the U.S. at the Venice Biennale and 24 years since the last retrospective of his work (at New York’s New Museum). The only substantial museum show of his work in the last quarter century was a 10-year survey (1997-2007) curated by Peter Selz in 2007 for the San Francisco alternative space Meridian Gallery (this show traveled to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa). Kravets/Wehby Gallery in New York has also been a place to see Colescott’s work. The year of his death he was included in the Rubell Family Collection’s widely seen, much-discussed “30 Americans” exhibition. It certainly seems time for some major U.S. museum to mount a full Colescott retrospective.

As I sometimes do when I want to index the level of an artist’s standing in cool academic art history circles, I looked up Colescott in the second edition of Art Since 1900, that influential 1,000-page-plus history authored by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and David Joselit. The fact that Colescott isn’t given even a passing mention (Morley, Georges and Saul are similarly ignored) reminds me why I started The Silo in the first place, and why I feel there’s still much work to be done.